The free beta of DreamCompute is coming to a close on October 1st. I know some of you are just kicking the tires, so we’re not going to automatically start billing you. If you want to continue using DreamCompute you’ll need to opt in for the “Advanced Beta”. If you choose not to opt in, your DreamCompute tenant - including your instances - will be deleted on October 1st, 2014.

Based on your feedback, I know how confusing pricing and billing for cloud services throughout the industry can be. There are hourly charges, API charges on top of that, and don’t forget about GB per HR storage fees! It’s dangerously easy to end up with a headache and a large credit card bill if you’re not careful.

To save you from this horrible pain we’re introducing a new way to bill for cloud computing with easy-to-understand pricing plans. You pay a single, flat monthly fee for a set quota then use it up to your chosen limit. You can even upgrade or downgrade your service tier at any point during your current billing period.

As an added bonus, we won’t charge you anything for download usage until the end of the Advanced Beta! Remember, choose a paid DreamCompute service plan by October 1st to keep your instances intact!

Thank you for taking part in the free beta and providing your feedback. It was extremely helpful to hear from so many you - your reactions have given us great ideas about how we can sexify DreamCompute even more. Keep the feedback coming!

For example, the 6GB tier allows you to run any combination instances so long as you stay under the 6GB memory limit. That could be 6 subsonic instances, or the combination of 1 lightspeed & 1 supersonic instances (or anything in between).